James White Interview (2009)

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the
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Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.
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In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.
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By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her
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King. We're here to take your calls as well. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.
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My name is Mike Abendroth and I'm your host. And today we have a special guest. His show is probably the original
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No Compromise Radio ministry. Online with us is Dr. James White, Alpha Omega Ministries.
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James, welcome. It's good to be with you. You know, I don't think I really have to introduce you. Most people know who you are and you've been on the show once before.
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So I'm glad to have you back and tell me what you're studying these days. Well, it always depends on what my next trip is gonna be, what my next presentation is gonna be.
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Next time I'm out week after next, I'll be in St. Louis. So I'll be, we keep trying to arrange debates and it's so hard to get people to debate anymore.
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It really is. And especially on the subject of reformed theology. So, since we can't get anybody really to debate that,
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I have to go online, grab a bunch of video and play video of people making objections and respond to them.
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Because that's the only way we're gonna have a debate. So, I'll be getting Norm Geisler and Dave Hunt and Ergen Kanner and I'll be, you know, putting together a bunch of video clips of them and let them speak their mind.
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And then I respond as close as I can get to a debate. And if they called you, you would say, oh, of course you can respond, right?
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You bet. If they want to be on the program, want to debate, I should amend that. I have recently gotten in contact with Dr.
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Michael Brown. I'm not sure if you've ever heard of Michael Brown, but we have a lot of things in common.
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He deals in the area of homosexuality, biblical view of homosexuality and ethics. And he's gonna be debating
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Bart Ehrman on his God's Problem book sometime next year. But he's a Jewish convert to Christianity.
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I moderated a debate between him and Rabbi Shochet at Arizona State University in 1995. Real smart guy, but we have some major differences.
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He was really involved with the Brownsville Revival stuff. And he also just did a series of programs on his own program called
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Why I'm Not a Calvinist. And he's a former Calvinist, and what I like about him, and you might like this too,
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I have not heard him straw man or caricature Reformed theology yet. Well, that's important.
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And that's almost never heard of in my experience. So he and I, I'm gonna be on his program, he's gonna be on mine, and we're gonna do at least one debate, hopefully.
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And that might be really useful because it's a very, very important subject. And it'd be nice to debate some folks who know the biblical languages, for example, and also don't caricature the other side.
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So I think that'd be really exciting. So that's the next thing. But really my focus is on February, I'm going to London.
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We've got debates with Muslims again, and trying to arrange a debate with Zakir Naik, probably the most, well,
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I think he's probably the most well -known Muslim in the world. He lives in Mumbai, India. And he took the mantle of Ahmed Deedat when he died.
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Ahmed Deedat was by far the most popular Muslim speaker in the world. And in fact,
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I just got back from New York. I did a debate with an imam there in New York on Jesus and the Quran and the Bible.
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And a group of Ahmadi Muslims attended the debate. Now, the Ahmadi Muslims are considered, they're looked at like by the
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Sunnis, which is 85 to 90 % of the world's population, like we'd look at Jehovah's Witnesses. Because they have a prophet that came after Muhammad.
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They had a prophet who was born in the 1800s, died like 1903, something like that. And so they're looked at as, you know, cult, but they do the five prayers, they have the
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Quran. Most of their theology is very much the same, not nearly as major difference as we have with Jehovah's Witnesses.
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Anyways, they're really nice folks. Unfortunately, they get persecuted all over the world. In Pakistan, they get killed by the
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Sunnis. And, but they don't fight back. And so they're peaceful Muslims, may their tribe increase.
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And so they came to the debate and I was talking with the imam afterward and he found out that Wednesday night at Baptist Church, I was doing my presentation on the reliability of the text of the
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New Testament, which I've never gotten to do at your church yet, but maybe someday. So yeah, you told, but the first time
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I met you, you said I'd never get back, invited back to the same church again. I've had you here three times.
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Yeah, but I haven't done my best presentation there yet. That's the problem. So, I mean,
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I was experimenting with you guys. I was, you know, how does this work? Oh, cool. That works for everybody. But anyway.
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I was wondering why our attendance went down after you left. Well, there you go. I thought it was just this
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Reform Baptist small as large view. That's how it works, the church shrinkage movement.
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Anyway, I was talking with him after the debate and he saw that I was going to be doing this presentation
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Wednesday night. They canceled their Wednesday night study and showed up at a Baptist Church just to hear my presentation on the reliability of the text of the
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New Testament. And as a result of that, I've gotten an invitation to come back to New York and to lecture at their mosque, which should prove to be very, very, very interesting.
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So, the Islamic topic remains at the top of the list. But I was talking about Dr.
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Naik, really, really well -known. I'm talking to these Ahmadi Muslims. And the only debate they've ever seen was the most famous debate,
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I think every Muslim in the world has seen this. And that was when Ahmed Didat debated. Do you know who Ahmed Didat debated?
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No, I do not. Norm Geisler, I don't know. Jimmy Swagger. Seriously? Oh, yeah.
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Jimmy Swagger. If you want to listen to something or watch something, that will be the equivalent of shoving bamboo shoots under your fingernails.
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It would be to watch Ahmed Didat destroy Jimmy Swagger in a debate. And here, even
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Ahmadi Muslims have seen the videotape of that debate. I don't know how many times that's been copied.
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It is probably the most watched thing in the Islamic world. And they all think that we all believe like Jimmy Swagger.
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Now, behind the scenes, do these guys, will they talk to you kindly and nicely? And is there just personal interaction that's...
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Well, especially the Ahmadi Muslims. Like I said, they're a very peaceful group. And so there seemed to be some real interest on the imam's part and his people's part concerning what it was
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I was saying and the fact I was responding to many of the things they believe about the alleged corruption in the Bible and things like that.
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The Ahmadi are different than the Sunnis because they believe Jesus was crucified. He was buried, but he survived and got out and went to India.
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And they worship at a tomb in India where they believe Jesus was buried. Seriously? Yeah, so that's one of the odd things about the
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Ahmadi perspective. Now tell our listeners, James, about when you go to the Muslim, when you go to speak to the
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Muslims, do you say to yourself, I'm going to preach the gospel? How do I preach the gospel? Maybe I shouldn't preach the gospel since it's no compromised radio.
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Your philosophy when you go in there besides to talk about the issue at hand, what do you do with the gospel?
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Well, obviously if the topic allows me to make a presentation,
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I'm going to make a presentation. I mean, when I debated Adnan Rashid in London a year ago now, it was, you know, we're not very far away from the location of the 7 -7 bombings.
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And I'm sitting there watching the people come in and there are women in full burqa, all I could see are their eyes, all sorts of men in full
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Islamic Arabic dress and things like that. And the thought had crossed my mind beforehand, how am
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I going to handle this when it comes to needing to say the things I need to say? Well, once the debate got started, there really wasn't any question about that.
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And during the rebuttal period, I just turned to the Muslims, I started preaching. I started talking about how you cannot be neutral about who
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Christ is. You've been told that Christ did this and that, the Quran only gives you this amount of information. However, what if what the
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New Testament had been saying for 600 years before Muhammad came along is true and Jesus is your creator and every breath you take and every beat of your heart comes from his hand.
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And yet you are believing he's just merely a prophet, he's not the son of God, he didn't die upon the cross.
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How would you expect God to treat you if he gave you this tremendous testimony of his own incarnation and yet you reject it and so on and so forth?
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So yeah, I mean, if the opportunity is there and most of the topics do allow you to get there without stretching things too far, shall we say, in making presentations of the gospel, then you do so.
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And the Muslims, so far, are not really sure what to do with me because they're not accustomed to, apologist to, first of all,
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I have my teaching background in the original languages and things like that, but more so know their faith, know the
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Quran, are learning Arabic, read the Hadith, and really try as best as my capabilities are to accurately represent what they believe.
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It really leaves them wondering. And people all the time are going, well, aren't you worried about your safety and don't you have a death threat?
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No, I don't. There's more of a, there's more of a respectfulness on their part because I'm showing them the respect of accurately representing what they're saying while saying it's wrong.
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I think there's a huge difference between saying Islam is wrong and Muhammad was not a prophet and demonstrating that you have taken the time to read the
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Quran and you know who Sahih al -Bukhari is and Sahih Muslim and you have
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Ibn Kathir sitting on your bookshelf and when you talk about the Quran, you look up all these, you look up al -Qurtabi and you look up all these sources to make sure that you're interpreting it in light of their best sources and stuff like that.
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There's a huge difference between that and just simply somebody come along and say, well, Muhammad was a pedophile and he was a, and one
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I respect and the one they don't respect at all. So as far as I keep getting opportunities,
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I'm just gonna keep taking them and especially if the soccer night thing were to take place. I mean, that'd be like the
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Superbowl because when he does debates in India, they have 25, 30 ,000 people in attendance for those things.
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So that would be awesome. And on a side note, you don't have your hair slicked back like Jimmy Swigert, so they probably respect you more.
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Actually, and I have a beard. So they respect me for that too. Nothing on the top.
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On the flip side, who's been the most angry with you, the person that you're debating and what about the congregation or audience?
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Two separate questions. Who's been the maddest at you, either be, tell our listeners some behind the scenes things, the stage curtain closes and somebody just was super mad at you.
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Tell us the most interesting story. Well, the nastiest anyone has been in a debate, that's gonna have to go to Robert St.
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Genes, a former Protestant turned Roman Catholic. In our debate on the mass in 1999,
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I think it was, in Long Island. I've put some of that on YouTube. And I would say that for simple nastiness and condescension and insult and so on and so forth, that's probably where you would go.
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As far as treatment outside of a debate, the King James Only guys, by far, make anybody else pale in significance as to their nastiness and their language and stuff like that.
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There, that's really, even the atheists are not quite as nasty as some of those folks.
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I mean, after my last debate with Dan Barker, you know, I've had to almost filter his emails because it's gotten a little bit weird from him.
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So, I mean, atheists obviously lacking a ethical foundation to not utilize various forms of profanity and so on and so forth tend to do so a lot.
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So that can certainly be nasty. And in fact, I don't even allow comments on my YouTube videos because the atheists,
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I had one video up on Richard Dawkins and it got more comments than any other video that I ever had.
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And once I closed down the comments on that, they'd start going into my other videos to fill those with profanity.
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So eventually I just shut off all comments because atheists cannot control their fingers on the internet. But as far as in a debate itself,
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I would have to say that it was a congenitist debate that was the nastiest one
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I've been involved with. So it is interesting that that would be the group. It's not Muslims.
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The Muslims tend to be, you know, some of them tend to circle off into some odd areas, but they don't tend to get all that nasty at all.
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It's other folks that do that. And I would imagine if I got some of the major King James only people to debate, which
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I can't, those could get pretty bad because I did have a debate with a King James only guy, but it was on the doctrines of grace.
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You can imagine where that one went. Wow. Oh, that was on Long Island. Yeah, that was. You know what,
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James? I had my - Brother Barker. Somebody at the church said to me, I said, oh, I'm gonna interview
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Dr. James White and we'll put it on the show next week. And he said, well, you don't have to really prepare anything.
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The only thing you have to be prepared to do is to interrupt James because he's got so much information throttling at you.
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While we're thinking about King James only, I wanted to promote some of your books. We're talking to Dr. James White. AOMin .org
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is the website, director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. Tell us about the King James only controversy and tell our readers, our listeners rather, why they would want to read it.
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And it's not necessarily a seminary textbook. Is it? Summarize the book for us. Well, it is used as a
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Bible college and seminary textbook, but I think it is because it is so practical and understandable.
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And I wrote it in 1994 initially, a new edition just came out about six, eight months ago, 32 pages longer, expanded.
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And it's my best, most popular book, actually, in all those years. Interestingly enough, my second most popular book,
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I bet you, you could never guess. I'll let you think while I finish answering your question. Marry Another Redeemer.
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Not even close. Roman Catholic controversy. Not even close.
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Something on Crown. Something on Crown. No. Go ahead. The King James only controversy. What it does is,
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I think the reason it's been so popular is it introduces you to the entire field of textual criticism, but it doesn't do it like a textual critical introductory work, which is normally very dry and very boring and just enough to put you into a coma.
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It does so by responding to the King James only movement, those people that say the King James is the only
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English translation we should be using. It's the final standard in some people to the point of aspiring to say it's inspired itself.
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And so it tells you where the New Testament came from, but it does so in a way that's understandable, that helps you to understand why you can trust the
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New Testament, why you can trust the transmission process. Very important in light of Bart Ehrman and misquoting
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Jesus and Jesus Interrupted and all the major mainstream media news outlets that just love to give you reasons to disbelieve and stuff like that.
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So it's very useful along those lines, but it's also very practical because there's a lot of people that have encountered a lot of churches that have split over the
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King James only issue, and especially down toward the South, but it can happen almost anywhere, especially if you get a person in leadership that gloms on to this stuff.
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And so it's been a very, very popular work and I'm very happy with that one.
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So what is my second most forgotten trinity? Nope. The Potter's Freedom would have been probably the most logical choice because it's done really, really well, but no.
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The co -author with the Dave Hunt book, the... No, no, no, not even close.
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Second most popular book I've written is Grieving Our Path Back to Peace. Oh yeah, that ecumenical work back in the 70s.
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No, not an ecumenical work. No, probably never even heard of it, did you? I have not heard of it.
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Wow, see, look at that. Look at that, did not... Well, I was waiting for my autographed copy and all I got was some ossuary book.
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It has been out for a long, long time and almost nobody knows that I wrote it and yet it's my second most popular book.
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It was being distributed at Ground Zero on 9 -13 to the people there.
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It's been used by law support groups for many, many years. I was a hospital chaplain for a number of years.
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Well, actually, God forced me into it. In 1991, we had Black Tuesday, I think it was. We lost 60 % of the ministry's funding in one day, which when you're already at subsistence level means go find a job.
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And I ended up as a hospital chaplain at a large hospital. And that is the toughest work
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I ever did. I am a Scotsman, Scotsman, don't even hug, let alone do anything else nice.
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So to try to be a chaplain and to lead a law support group and to be in the emergency room and the critical care unit and stuff like that,
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I had never even seen anybody die until I had that experience. And it changes you. And what happened was, even after I finished doing that work and I was back full -time with Alpha Omega, an acquaintance of mine lost his 29 -day -old granddaughter.
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His daughter had epilepsy. She had a seizure rolled over on the baby and suffocated the baby. And I went to the funeral and funerals are not supposed to have caskets that are only 18 inches long or something like that.
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And so when I got back, I just did it for my friend initially. I just cleared my desk.
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And for four days, I wrote everything that I had learned in my years of being a hospital chaplain about grieving.
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And once I got done, I realized it was in fact a book, not a long book, because people who are in the grieving process don't want to read a poem anyway.
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And so I gave it to my friend and then I sent it to my editor at Bethany House. And he loved it, but he said,
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I'm taking your name off. Before I bring it in house, I'm going to take your name off because of exactly what you were thinking,
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King James One Controversy, Roman Catholic Controversy, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. No one would ever believe that you wrote this.
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So he took my name off. I brought it in house. They loved it. And once they had said, yes, we want it, they said who wrote it.
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And that's when he told them like, oh, great, how are we going to market this? Yeah, Jimmy Whiteman. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Lucas, that's Greek for white. We'll come up with a different name. But yeah, and it's still in print.
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And the probably the only reason that you're not aware of it is that I haven't been aware of a loss in your family because normally
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I end up sending one to someone. And then they're just shocked that it's actually as practical and useful and helpful as it is because everybody figures
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I'm just a mean, terrible, horrible, nasty guy that just sits around ravaging false religions and wouldn't have a heart anywhere within 30 yards of me.
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So it actually, I have to keep it quiet or it'll ruin my credibility. I was going to say you might be mean, but you're not nasty.
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So, hey, listen, let's talk about the God who justifies. I really liked that book, a comprehensive study on the doctrine of justification.
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Buchanan's book was a long time ago. And tell me this, James, in light of that book and its topic, what is going on with seminaries, large evangelical seminaries in this country that we know very well that will have people on staff that will be professors who deny the active imputation of Christ's righteousness?
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Number one, explain to our listeners what that is and then why are seminaries employing such kind of guys?
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Well, when we talk about the active and passive obedience of Christ, we're talking about really just a full description of the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us.
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We can think of the righteousness of Christ in light of his death in regards to the forgiveness of sins. But remember, there's the positive command of Scripture, to love the
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Lord your God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, your neighbors, yourself, and so on and so forth. If we only have our transgressions forgiven, we don't have the fulfillment.
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We don't have that full righteousness that one needs to have to stand before God. And so, when we talk about the active and passive obedience of Christ, we're talking about his actively fulfilling the law of God in our place.
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And since we are united with him, we have his life, his righteousness. And that provides a perfect, seamless garment of righteousness by which we can stand before God the
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Father without the need to add to that with our own works and so on and so forth. And that is a very particularly reformed understanding because it's based upon substitutionary atonement.
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But even then, the Westminster Confession of Faith does not use that terminology. It is the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 that specifically utilizes that terminology in regards to the nature of the righteousness of Christ.
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Now, why would major seminaries have people on staff that would be denying that? Well, there's a couple reasons.
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In one instance that I'm thinking of, it's because the seminary became more conservative after a more liberal period and that some of the professors that are still there have tenure and there's really not much anybody can do about it, unfortunately.
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That is part of the academic theme that may be a bit problematic.
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I certainly think the Christian Academy should be much more connected to the church, personally, and hence utilize that kind of standard.
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But in other cases, there are certain systems of theology that come in that would undermine the concept of the imputation of the righteousness of Christ out of a fear, for example, of what's called covenantal theology or something like that.
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And as a result, people have developed an allergic reaction to the idea of needing the positive, the active righteousness of Christ imputed to us.
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And so there's lots of different reasons. The primary reason, honestly, if you just look at seminaries as a whole, is because seminaries as a whole have lost a really high view of scripture, and hence the idea that there is a divine revelation in scripture that can be known and can be grasped and preached and so on and so forth isn't necessarily part and parcel of where a lot of seminaries are anymore.
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Excellent answer, James. I'm gonna just interrupt you just for a second because this is very important. There's a couple that's been coming to our church based on the programs,
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No Compromise Radio Ministry. They're Oneness Pentecostals. And they want to come because their
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Pentecostal church was crazy. They still probably think we believe in three gods. Your book,
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The Forgotten Trinity, is an excellent book. Within about a minute and a half, tell those listeners about who the
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Godhead is so they can understand it better. Well, I think the most important thing for a Oneness believer to recognize is that the scriptures tell us that Jesus Christ, the second person of the
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Trinity, the eternal son, existed as a divine person prior to his birth in Bethlehem.
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Very clearly in John chapter one, we are told that the word preexisted his birth in Bethlehem, not really as an idea, but as a divine person.
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In Philippians chapter two, he is shown to have been active in giving consideration to his relationship to the
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Father before his birth in Bethlehem. And in John 17 five, Jesus, in praying to the
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Father, not only distinguishes himself clearly from the Father, but speaks that time before creation when he shared the very glory of the
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Father, not merely as an idea, but as a divine person. The Oneness believer thinks that, in essence,
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God is one person who manifests himself at one point as the Father, and then the
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Son is the physical nature that the Father inhabits, and then now he's the Spirit. And so you have one person that has manifested himself in different ways.
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That's not the biblical teaching. The Son has eternally existed as a divine person, as has the Spirit. That's why we believe in the doctrine of the
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Trinity. One God, one being of God, shared fully and completely by three divine persons, the Father, Son, and the
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Holy Spirit, and that they are not confused with one another, and they are not identified with one another. Well, thank you for that.
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We're talking to Dr. James White, author of The Forgotten Trinity, King James Only Controversy, and The God Who Justifies.
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I'd encourage everyone to go to aomin .org, great article on homosexual uber -rights, good article on Servetus the
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Evangelical. Dr. White, it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot.
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God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.
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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.
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